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How the Digital Age Revived The Little Mermaid Series

In 1992, Disney released a brilliant animated series based on their beloved The Little Mermaid movie. The series took place about a year before the movie and expanded on the geography and lifestyles of the merfolk in the underwater kingdom of Atlantica. It had memorable songs, decent animation, and clever stories. Ariel was as open-minded and loving as ever, helping all sorts of outcasts in her kingdom who thought that they would never find friendship or love. The Little Mermaid animated series is one of the best mermaid princess shows I have ever seen, matched only by Dyesebel. It's not surprising that older fans of the show often wondered what happened to it until recently. Unlike the movie, the series never received a proper DVD release. Only specific episodes of it could be found on Disney Princess VHS or DVD sets, usually alongside an episode of the Aladdin series that featured Princess Jasmine. Though The Little Mermaid series had a brief syndicated run on ToonDisney, it disappeared without a trace soon after.

Disney's first DVD releases were experimental. They were cautious about whether or not the new medium would last, so they released limited editions of a handful of their most popular movies. When those took off, they created the Platinum Editions of their films, expensive box sets containing a treasure trove of bonus features. These editions were likely expensive to make, so they only did them for movies that they knew would sell. Box sets for their more obscure television shows took a back seat, since those were less likely to generate a profit. Around 2005, Disney experimented with some very cheaply made Disney Princess DVDs to see if they could sell products off the Disney Princess brand alone. Among them were Sing Along DVDs, party planning DVDs, and story DVDs. The Princess Stories sets contained individual episodes of the Little Mermaid and Aladdin series just like the VHS tapes they released in the '90s. Unfortunately, these DVDs were so poorly designed that they didn't make enough of a profit to warrant releasing a full box set of the series.

Then, in 2008, Disney made a move that dashed any hope fans of the series had for an official release. Ariel's Beginning, the prequel to The Little Mermaid, contradicted many of the original characters and stories from in the animated series. Like the show, Ariel's Beginning took place one year before the events of The Little Mermaid, but the personalities of Flounder, Sebastian, and King Triton were vastly altered. Recurring characters from the series such as Urchin and Pearl were nowhere to be seen, and a forgettable mermaid governess who was never mentioned in the series was sloppily tacked in as the prequel's main villain. It also completely changed the timeline of how Ariel met Flounder as well as the ages and roles of her sisters. It wouldn't have done the company any good to release the series at the same time that they were trying to promote something that would contradict it so heavily.

Since the prequel was released, the way that people watch media has changed. The Netflix generation kicked off a new era of digital streaming. This costs very little for Disney because they no longer have to put money or resources toward fancy packages or bonus features. As a result, more content than ever is available on their official streaming sites as well as their new DisneyNOW app. Once Disney streamlined all their sites to make sure everyone using them had a cable account, they gave themselves collateral to ensure that they were still profiting from the streams. With their plans for their own version of Netflix in the works, they will to profit even more with minimal effort on their part. As of right now The Little Mermaid series is available to stream in full on the Disney Junior website and DisneyNOW app to be introduced to a new generation of mermaid lovers.

The Little Mermaid series is perfect for today's youth because it encourages diversity. Ariel befriends an orphan merman who steals to survive, a deaf mermaid who dreams of singing like Ariel, a sea monster with no friends, a wizard fish who is harassed by the rest of his kind, a baby killer whale and many others. It teaches that you are capable and worthy of being loved no matter who you are or where you come from. The series successfully foreshadows the movie in which Ariel finds love in the human world despite not fitting in due to being from the sea and losing her voice. The the lackluster prequel Ariel's Beginning exceeded the series in animation quality but failed to live up to the series in just about every other aspect, especially heart. I look forward to seeing new generations enjoy The Little Mermaid series for years to come.

Back around 2012, a friend of mine sent me a press release about how Disney was making a new princess show about a little girl from a poor village who becomes a princess overnight when her mother marries the king. The endearing image of the little girl on the press release instantly caught my attention with her unique reddish-brown curls, playful expression, and gorgeous lavender dress that was dripping with pearl accents. Something about this description and image got me so excited for the series that I got to work right away on making a grown-up sized cosplay of Sofia's elegant gown. The series premiered on Disney Junior with a TV special called Once Upon a Princess in which Sofia received her legendary Amulet of Avalor and sang about her insecurities for her future life as a princess heroine in the song "Not Ready To Be a Princess." I loved her instantly. Over the next six years, she took me on a four season-long journey filled with Disney Princesses, fairies, mermaid…

The internet has been buzzing about Kingdom Hearts III finally getting a release date after fifteen long years of anticipation. Unless it gets delayed again, we will be able to catch up with Sora, Donald, and Goofy as they travel through the realms of various Disney movies on January 29th, 2019. There have been a couple of trailers dropped over the last few days revealing footage from Frozen, Tangled, Toy Story, Monsters Inc., Hercules, and Pirates of the Caribbean. For me, the biggest announcement came from the latter half of last night's trailer in which Larxene of Organization XIII remarked that Elsa might be one of the new seven pure hearts that they needed for their latest quest. Anyone who has played the first game knows that this is a reference to the Princesses of Heart, a select group of Disney Princesses who had their chance to become video game royalty when they got captured by Maleficent in an attempt to use their pure hearts to open the Door to Darkness. My biggest pe…

We all had lots of fun playing with princess dolls as kids and brushing their hair until it became ratty and tangled. For those of us who are older, there has is the option of purchasing pricier collectible dolls that are made with finer details in their hair and clothes and come with their own stands for display purposes. While princesses have never exactly been lacking in options for collectible dolls, the Disney Princess Designer Collection that was revealed at the D23 Expo in 2011 was the start of something special. Each princess had her own designer dress that looked like it came straight off a modern-day runway. The collection was released alongside lithographs, cards, mugs, and other paraphernalia featuring beautiful matching artwork. The dolls themselves weren't sculpted from your typical Barbie mold. They had fully articulated wrist and elbow joints, salon quality hair that stayed perfectly in place, bigger painted eyes, and long realistic eyelashes that you could actuall…

In 2008, the Philippines released a mermaid princess telenovela that was based on a popular graphic novel by Mars Ravelo in 1952. Dyesebel is loosely based on the story of "The Little Mermaid" with a few distinct differences. It was Dyesebel's mother, Queen Lucia, who first fell in love with a human and left the underwater world of Sirenea to be with him, sacrificing her memories of her life as a mermaid in the process. Dyesebel was born on land, but because of her tail, her mother returned her to the sea, entrusting her to her best friend, Banak, to raise her. Her human father, Tino, was murdered by humans who believed that mermaids were bad luck. Unaware of the circumstances of her birth, Dyesebel grew up curious about the human world until one day, she fell in love with a human and was doomed to follow in her mother's footsteps. The 2008 adaptation of Dyesebel is performed in the native Filipino language, Tagalog, but I was able to watch it with English subtitles …

If you're one of the five people on Earth who still hasn't seen the new Wreck-It Ralph 2 trailer that dropped this morning, I'm here to break it down for you. The trailer featured roughly the first half of a scene in which all of the living voice actresses for the Disney Princesses reprised their roles as Vanellope snuck into their secret internet headquarters that was presented at the D23 Expo last year. A screenshot released last week previewed the scene with Ariel missing, but now we see that she was just off-screen combing her hair with her favorite dinglehopper in a blinged out version of pink tea dress along with lots more animation of other the princesses in their oddly disproportionate new CGI style animation. Let's take a look.

For starters, it's a bit odd how Ariel and Cinderella have swapped the levels of bling on their ballgowns. In the 1950 animated movie, Cinderella's dress appeared to have made from a lightweight silvery-white fabric emblazoned w…

The internet went a little crazy when Entertainment Weekly released Disney's first promo photos of the fully costumed actors from their upcoming Aladdin remake last week. Many were disappointed with what they saw, which unfortunately tends to be the case for live-action remakes. For instance, Aladdin's signature purple vest was changed to red, making it closer to the Broadway version of the show. He was also given a relatively nice shirt underneath, which is more than a little confusing for those of us who remember how poor he was in the original film. Will Smith as the Genie looked a little too much like a normal human instead of a mystical blue entity, but apparently that's still coming. Princess fans were most excited to see previews of Jasmine's wardrobe. In terms of quantity, the internet did not disappoint. We now have images of three of Jasmine's looks that will be featured in the movie as well as a peek at her new handmaiden.

In my "Little Mermaid" origins post, I mentioned that there were three live-action movies in the works based on the beloved Hans Christian Andersen tale. Since then, a few announcements have been made about all three of these movies. One of them has a theatrical release date, and it's sooner than you might think. The circus-themed indie movie that's had a trailer out for several years now is coming to select AMC theaters on August 17th. That's in two months! I wish I could be more excited about it, but the plot looks a lot closer to the 2006 tongue-in-cheek teen mermaid movie Aquamarine than the fairy tale that it's named after. The trailer focuses on how a little girl's belief in mermaids has the potential to save the aquatic heroine who is held captive in a tank at a carnival. I've been feeling indifferent about this adaptation ever since the first trailer was released, but it's nice to know that I will have the option to see it on the big scree…

Sofia the First, everyone's favorite princess-in-training, has met every official Disney Princess that existed when her show began with the sole exception of Pocahontas. The power of her purple amulet granted her the ability to summon famous princesses whenever she was in trouble. Technically, she never met Anna either, but the episode "Olaf and the Tale of Miss Nettle" implied that she was supposed to meet her but got Olaf instead because her amulet was on the fritz. About a year ago, her amulet turned pink and granted her new powers. It now sends her to help princesses, meaning that the chances of her meeting Pocahontas at this point are virtually nonexistent. Why did they acknowledge every other princess movie except this one? Actually, they did acknowledge the 1995 animated classic in an episode of Sofia, but it was very subtle.

In the 2015 episode of Sofia the First, "The Secret Library," Sofia discovers a hidden passageway beneath her castle where a boat …